The Next Target: Religious Schools

Dave Sussman

Jun 22, 2016

The latest effort by California Progressives (I know, redundant) is State Bill SB 1146 which will remove funding and financial assistance to religious school students unless the school gives up it’s religious convictions, removes faith from it’s curriculum, student life and educational requirements. The reason? Discrimination.

It appears 1146 intends to secularize Christian schools with the exception for seminaries and departments of religion that train ministers. In other words, if this bill were to become law (to be voted on this week), it would separate the religion departments within the greater campus of where it resides, while secularizing the rest of the school. This measure would in effect result in no more Christian or Jewish colleges per se, but ‘allow’ only in-house religion departments.

The bill came directly after LGBT activists got the Obama administration to release a list of religious higher education institutions that receive exemptions from federal regulations requiring androgynous and secularizing policies, such as sex-eradicated group showers and the freedom to hire partially based on fidelity to strains of philosophy or theology a particular institution promises to uphold.

If any SJW politicians did their research, they would have known there is already a California law called “Equity in Higher Education Act,” which is now in the California Education Code at §§ 66250 through 66292.4. It provides that “No person shall be subjected to discrimination on the basis of disability, gender, gender identity, gender expression, nationality, race or ethnicity, religion, [or] sexual orientation . . . by any postsecondary educational institution that receives, or benefits from, state financial assistance or enrolls students who receive state student financial aid.” Cal. Ed. Code, § 66270

Since I’m not a lawyer, maybe one can answer this: Doesn’t Equity in Higher Education Act already cover discrimination in all schools where students receive financial aid?

The most troubling provision of this bill limits the religious liberty to integrate faith and learning throughout the educational experience.

The bill effectively eliminates the religious exemption under current law that allows Christian colleges and universities to operate in accordance with their beliefs, including the freedom to hire only Christian faculty and staff. If passed without amendments, the new law would also very likely disqualify students attending California Christian colleges and universities from eligibility for Cal Grants, a key state-level student aid program.

The intent of this bill is transparent: to target Christian schools that maintain Biblical beliefs on marriage and sexuality, and to use the threat of losing government funds to force them to change those beliefs. It puts schools into a terrible predicament. If they maintain their beliefs, their prospective students will not be eligible for Cal Grants, and the schools will suffer significant financial loss. If they give in to this requirement, they compromise their core principles.

This bill will have a profoundly negative impact upon students, particularly low-income students. Because a large number of religious schools in California will opt out of state funding, thousands of students will shift into the already-overcrowded CSU and UC systems.

The secular Left have made it abundantly clear of their disdain for all things religious (except maybe radical Islam). Their efforts to remove any signs of faith from the public square, or historic records such as Missionaries from the Seal for LA County have been largely successful.

Unsatisfied with winning battles, and unfettered by the rule of law, leftist politicians continue to bypass the Bill of Rights to limit religious liberty, and punish all who disagree with them. When will the pushback begin?